Many companies employ call centers to provide an interface for exchanging information with customers. In many call center environments, a customer service representative initially queries a caller for specific pieces of information, such as an account number, credit card number, address and zip code. The customer service representative then enters this information into a specific field on their terminal or workstation. There are a number of ways in which errors may be encountered when entering the customer information. For example, the customer service representative may not understand the caller correctly, and may hear the information differently than it was spoken by the caller. In addition, the customer service representative may forget, transpose, or otherwise mistype some of the information as it is entered into the workstation.
Call centers often employ interactive voice response (IVR) systems, such as the CONVERSANT® System for Interactive Voice Response, commercially available from Avaya Inc., to provide callers with information in the form of recorded messages and to obtain information from callers using keypad or voice responses to recorded queries. An IVR converts a caller's voice responses into a textual format for computer-based processing. While IVR systems are often employed to collect some preliminary customer information, before the call is transferred to a live agent, they have not been employed to work concurrently with a live agent and to assist a live agent with the entry of a caller's spoken words as text. A need therefore exists for a method and apparatus that employ speech technology to validate the accuracy of a customer service representative's textual entry of a caller's spoken responses.